1. Field of The Invention
Applicant's invention relates to a disposable birdhouse, more specifically a disposable birdhouse comprising a cardboard housing with cardboard nesting boxes located inside the housing.
2. Background Information
Birdhouses make attractive accessories for the home and garden. Further, birds are beneficial, for example, in providing nesting to birds, which are helpful in keeping the insect population in check.
Birdhouses come in a wide variety of sizes and shapes and are made from a number of different natural and synthetic materials. Typically, birdhouses are designed to be long lasting and attractive. They are often mounted outside on a vertical, in ground pole or from a tree. The birdhouse size, diameter of the entrance hole and its location are typical factors that govern the success of attracting and keeping cavity-nesting birds in the birdhouse. For example, Meadow Friends.TM. sells a functional and non-decorative birdhouse (www.pivot.net-ledrumn) called the "Victoria Delight" that measures 6 inches tall by 6 inches wide with a single hole centrally located on the front wall. It is suitable for swallows, phoebes, and sparrows.
Another example of commercially available birdhouses comes from Yankee-Style.TM. Birdhouses of Cohasset, Mass. Yankee offers a number of birdhouses in a variety of styles including the "Yankee Two-Decker," which is a two-story birdhouse sized 11 inches wide by 16 inches tall, with two holes, one above the other. It is designed to be mounted atop a pole or hung from a tree. Yankee also offers a "Colonial High Living" birdhouse which is mounted on a post. This birdhouse is 27 inches wide by 19 inches tall and contains apartments for 6 birds in the front and 6 in the back. The Yankee birdhouses are made of painted wood and are currently priced in the $100-$200 range.
Other birdhouses are made of cedar and have been designed for specific cavity-nesting birds found in North America.
This is just a brief illustration of the wide variety of birdhouses currently available. Prior art birdhouses are designed to be durable and long lasting. They are typically made of treated or painted wood and securely fastened together with nails or screws. Such sturdy construction allows the birdhouse to survive years of rain, wind, and sun and still provide accommodating housing for our feathered friends. However, such high quality construction comes at a price, and current birdhouses are not inexpensive. Moreover, they are often provided to the consumer in an already built form, which represents a bulky item to ship, or they come broken down, in which case the consumer has the occasional daunting task of building the structure.
What has heretofore been unavailable is a disposable, inexpensive, easily shipped and easily consumer-built birdhouse, all of which advantages are provided in Applicant's unique, novel, disposable birdhouse. More particularly, Applicant has provided a birdhouse constructed from folded cardboard. The birdhouse is shipped "broken down," much like a cardboard box can be broken down, and is therefore easy to ship. It is also disposable and designed to last about a season, after which it may be disposed. Disposability is desired if one wants to avoid the necessity of the seasonal cleaning of the birdhouse. In other words, at the end of the season, the birdhouse is simply discarded, along with the contents of the birdhouse and a new one is put in its place.
Applicant provides for these and other advantages in a birdhouse having a cardboard shell, the cardboard shell having wall members hingedly attached one to the other along seams connecting one wall to an adjacent wall (like a cardboard box). Moreover, Applicant's cardboard shell provides space in which to stack a number of individual nesting boxes, each nesting box having a hole in a front wall thereof to communicate to the outside of the cardboard shell and each nesting box providing an "apartment" for a cavity-nesting bird. Further, Applicant's unique disposable birdhouse includes a cardboard roof for fastening to the housing shell, the roof, housing shell, and nesting boxes all being made of cardboard which may be painted.